


Never Be Over You

by mysteryoflovemyway



Series: Later Still [2]
Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternative Lifestyles, Bisexual Male Character, Bisexuality, Canon Bisexual Character, Elio's POV, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Italy, M/M, Multi, New York City, POV First Person, POV Male Character, Post-Canon, Summer, Summer Love, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-16
Updated: 2018-04-29
Packaged: 2019-04-23 12:09:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14332179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mysteryoflovemyway/pseuds/mysteryoflovemyway
Summary: **Part two of my CMBYN fanfic - start first with Later Still.**This fic takes place right after the end of Later Still, and follows Elio and Oliver as they navigate their relationship in New York City, and back to the beloved Perlman villa in the summer of 1984. Though Elio and Oliver are finally together, there are still some things to work out between the two of them.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Again, I am in no way trying to replicate André Aciman’s fantastic writing as that cannot be done - I am simply trying to recreate the atmosphere of the film and novel using my own writing style and insight into the characters created by Aciman, and brought to life so perfectly by Timothée Chalamet, Armie Hammer, and the rest of the cast.

SOMEWHERE IN NORTHERN MANHATTAN

SUMMER 1984

How often do we dream? Is it only at night, with our eyes closed and the stars looking on? Is it only when we will our minds to be at rest and they inevitably wrench us into thought? Or is it also when we are awake, casting glances around us for stability, seeking strength in chaos? Is it when our eyes are wide open, when the sun smiles down on us and reminds us, again, that its only companions are not just the moon and the sky?

“What are you thinking about?” he asks, and my eyes are wide open, fixed on the stretch of skin between the waistband of his shorts and a freckle on his hipbone.

 _We dream every second of every day_ , I think. _At least, I do when I’m with you._

“Not you,” I mutter, and he laughs into my hair. I feel his fingers curling under the hem of my shirt and I inhale a sharp breath before he steals them away, his face already leaving my hair. Within seconds, none of his body is touching mine and I feel a certain ache behind my bellybutton, wishing he’d stay just a second more.

 _Don’t go,_ I want to plead. _I can’t stand to be even a room away from you. Not anymore. I’ve waited too long. Please, just stay._

He knows me, has always known me, will always know me. So he says, “I have to pack before tomorrow. Or do you not want me to go back with you?”

“I’d rather be here,” I hear myself reply, looking over at the typewriter a suite like this supplies, a ream of paper ready to go. I imagine him hunched over, typing for hours on end, drinking coffee without tasting it, listening to music without hearing it. In his own world of words and more words, ones that don’t make sense to him but do to me. I understand him even when I don’t want to.

“Here?” He shakes his head, leaning into the doorframe of the bathroom. He has ditched his shirt from earlier, but sweat still seems to have gathered around his neckline. I stare at it in the light, all but mocking me. “Please elaborate on your desire for staying in a city that wants me only for my student loans.”

I roll my eyes. “Take me to your favorite places before we go, then.”

“My favorite places? I don’t have any—anything so far away from you could never hold my attention for very long. Jen still thinks this coffee shop over in Chelsea that she loves is also my favorite— _Jesus_ , do you want to go there? Experience New York through the lens of my mediocrity—for you, Elio, I’ll oblige, just this once.”

In these words, in his shy smile, I know: my Oliver— _Elio, Elio, Elio, Elio_ —is here for now and for always.

I crawl out of the bed, where the sheets are still perfectly tucked into the mattress, and where the pillows had only held our heads for a few sweet minutes. I had anticipated a feverish urgency once we had left Jenny at the house they shared, but so far the only parts of my skin he had touched were my hands, my face, my chest. I wondered if he was afraid it had been too long—do I still remember? Do I still want him in that way?

But he couldn’t honestly think that. I had come all the way from Italy for him—I wanted him in that way since the beginning.

“We’ll take the subway over,” he calls from inside the bathroom, the door half shut. “God, what time is it?”

“Almost ten,” I tell him, toying with my watch as I sit cross-legged on the chair near the window. “We don’t have to go just yet. We have all day.”

He reappears in my line of vision, mouth crooked into a self-assured smirk. “All day to do what?”

“Things…”

I duck my head out of habit, shaking my hair into my eyes, offering a laugh that I shoulder in an effort to hide myself from the universe’s view. How is it that we become shy all over again, in the atmosphere of the ones we desire? How is it that I am him, he is me, and yet I still feel that piece of me that’s nervous or anxious or too much of every emotion? I feel so much for him, and I want him so much, that at times it comes out like I haven’t ever been with him before, that I am so innocent. Perhaps that is his hesitation—he doesn’t want to overwhelm me with it all in such easy succession. Perhaps he knows me better than I will ever know myself. And I sincerely hope that he does.

_Please tell me when I’m feeling too much. Please tell me that it’s okay that I still feel weird in your cocoon, but not because I want you to leave. No, because I want you so much that I get too in my head and think that if you take one step away, you’ll not come back. I want to be with you so much, so close, that I think I’m overwhelming you. And maybe that overwhelms me too._

“Elio,” he says. He kneels in front of me, puts his hands on my knees and cocks his head as if listening for some kind of omission of doubt. Concern swims around inside his eyes, so blue in the light coming in through the white curtains that I want nothing more than to be lost in them for the rest of our lives.

And yet.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper and I hate myself, hearing the way the words come out, like catching on sandpaper. They’re short and rough, braised with apprehensive uncertainty.

_You’re in a hotel suite with your Oliver in New York fucking City and he’s coming back to Italy with you, he’s no longer with his fiancé—what more do you want? What’s wrong with you? Is this not every dream you’ve ever had? Is this not the dream of your yesterday, your today, your tomorrow, and after that?_

“Sorry for what?”

“God, I don’t know,” I mutter to the floor. “For being me, I guess.”

He doesn’t laugh, but I know he wants to. Or maybe I want to. So pathetic, in my own eyes, but no way of helping myself out of it. I must look like a royal fuckup, but he will never say it.

“Who would I be if not for you?” he asks. “I hate when you say things like that—you’re the only person I want to be you, all the goddamn time. Even if you’re mad, if you’re being ridiculous, even if you’re being an absolute asshole—I’ll still want you, the you that you’ve always been. Do you understand that?”

_Do you understand that my existence means nothing without you?_

“Yes.” I give one nod. “More than you know.”

“Good.”

We say nothing more and I close my eyes, crane my neck backward so I can feel the filtered sun dot my face. I feel his body next to mine, and his eyes all over me, and I realize that my anxiety has been forfeited to him, again and again. That he will always take on what I cannot, that he will do for me what I do for him. We will never again be two separate people—we never were.

I feel his lips press into my kneecap a few moments later, his hands circling my thigh. “Cup of coffee first,” he murmurs and stands up, holding out his palm for me to take. “You can’t go through a day in New York without one.”

We are out on the street in minutes, having abandoned his suitcases half-full of random items he’d thrown in earlier this morning. Jenny, having orchestrated our reunion without either of us knowing so, had already booked us a hotel room last night, after dinner, though we didn’t leave until a few hours ago. I had been in a daze, watching them together but not, him moving around her with “sorry”s and “do you know where my trunks went? The new ones?” and “how will I ever thank you for this?”

 _I want you both to be so happy, and I know that you are. Come visit me soon, and we’ll work out the rest of your things later. Right now, go be with him_ , she’d said to him. I never knew losing someone could be so easy, but perhaps she had never really had him to begin with.

A throng of businessmen separates us now as we round a busy corner, and Oliver, his tall frame above the rest, immediately stops several paces ahead of me to look around when he realizes I’m no longer beside him. I find him so quickly, but I don’t say anything for a few seconds, stealing myself at just watching him. How his eyes, panicked, search for me. How he does not hesitate to yell out, “ _Oliver_!”

It is only then that I push past a woman walking a dog and latch on to his arm, allowing his face to drain of worry and recover with relief.

“Elio,” I answer, like a game of Marco Polo. Like a game I’ll forever play with him, as my only partner, my only enemy, my only ally, my only everything. “I’m here.”

“You’re here.”

His thumb brushes over my cheek, he waits for me to smile into it, and then he waves his hand and breaks out into a sprint down the sidewalk, beckoning me along like he doesn’t want to miss anything, but he doesn’t want me to miss it, either. _Look, there’s another overrated bagel shop. And an overrated pizza place. There’s an off-broadway theatre—you’d love it, except it closed down last year. And over there you can get the most over-priced hotdog in the entire city. Isn’t New York amazing?_

The subway is stuffy and sweaty, full of bodies that are late or in a hurry anyway. Impatience seeps into every corner of the car, with voices talking over one another and mouths eating things out of tinfoil packages. Oliver, his body pressed against mine as we stand holding on to an overhead railing, glances down at me as a girl with tattoos squished beside us stares at the Star of David necklaces hung around both of our necks.

“Are you two in a band?” she asks, pointblank.

Before I can think of any kind of response, Oliver nods and flashes a smile saved for the foolish. I bite my lip and look away, listening. Always listening.

“Jews of Discretion,” he tells her. “We’re very popular overseas.”

“Cool, see you around, then.”

We watch her get off at the next stop, her hand up in a slight salute, and as she exits onto the platform I fall to the ground at his feet in a miracle of hysterics. My eyes stream with laughter, and when the subway stops again, he has to all but drag me off. His arms quiver with my weight—our weight—and we are a mass of messy happiness when we emerge back into the daylight. I’m reminded of our drunken nights in Bergamo and my heart escapes me and returns back to him again with bright neon pleasure.

“You’re unbelievable. You—That was the best thing I’ve ever witnessed.”

He smirks. “The best thing, huh?”

“Nothing else comes to mind, really.”

“Pity,” he says. “You’ve come all the way here for nothing then, I suppose.”

I notice the shop behind him then, and squinting into the sun, gesture up at the sign. “Nothing but the coffee.”

The sun and all the stars we’ve caught between us come to life in his smile as he opens the door wide and follows me in. I am inside his never-ending current, washed ashore with his breeze. Ever since he had walked in that door yesterday and seen me there, waiting for him and only him, I keep asking myself if any of this is real. Am I so naïve as to believe this? Or am I too cynical, against the world, for thinking this couldn’t possibly be so? I want to keep touching him, keep in his locked gaze forever, just so I know it’s true. When we sit down at a counter with vinyl seats from the 70s, the music lazily sifting through the speakers even older, and the mugs we’re brought much too modern, I’m hit with a heavy forbearance for the right now.

_This is my life. This is 1984. This is New York. This is Oliver, right here. This is me, right here. There is a world around us, but there is also a world inside us, for only us, for the rest of time. We may not have this moment in time for very long, but this moment will always have us._

“So Jenny likes this place,” I say after several sips of average coffee. Whether I am conditioned to think it or not, Italian roast is much more palatable.

_And I am a pretentious asshole to everyone here._

“Her favorite.”

Without much warning, I am hit with the feeling that, even though he does not love her in the way that he does me, he has lived with her everyday for months, he must know nearly all of what she favors. Her favorite coffee, her favorite place to shop, her favorite pair of shoes, her favorite place to vacation, her favorite park in the city aside from Central Park. Does he know my favorite things? If I were to say one aloud, would he have known it before I said it?

I realize he is waiting for me, as I have always been waiting for him, and I stifle a schoolboy snicker. “I don’t even really like coffee.”

His face flashes a knowing smirk. My stomach buzzes.

_Yes, he knows._

“Me neither,” he says anyway. His eyes slide over to me and he leans in, close to my ear. “But we both know I’m rather accustomed to pretending to like things for the sake of everyone else but myself.”

Am I dreaming? I must be dreaming—with my eyes open, yes. With his eyes open. With the thoughts of everyday I’d known him in my head, in his head. Of the berm and the waterfall and the orchard and the river and his espadrilles. He pushes the coffee away from him and asks if they have any juice— _orange juice is fine, please_ —and yes, that thought is there, too.

 _You remind me of someone_ , I think. _What I mean to say is, you remind me of myself._

We stay another twenty minutes at the coffee shop, not drinking coffee, and I don’t so much as speak as wander through his intensities and extremities. The contours of his face as the fluorescent lights of New York hit his cheekbones. The way his eyes sparkle when they catch the glint of a compact mirror from a table behind us. How, sometimes, he talks fast when someone stands in line not far from us, like he wants to tell me something _so badly_ , but he doesn’t want anyone else to understand. What we have is for us only, and allowing anyone to hear so much as a _here, have a scone_ could send what we have into sharp oblivion.

“We have to get out of here,” he says when the lunch rush begins to arrive for the coffee shop’s humble excuse at an entrée menu. “The _Americanos_ are coming.”

I bug my eyes out, make like I’m losing every bit of cool that I absolutely do not have. “ _Holy shit_ , I didn’t realize this would be such an ambush.”

The faces all blur together as we zigzag our way back outside, and all that’s in focus is him. Him, laughing with his eyes closed. Him, slipping on his sunglasses with one hand and the other resting on my shoulder. Him, nodding down the street. Him, him, him.

“Onward,” he says, looking both ways, but most of all—looking at me. Grinning at me. Seeking me out amongst everyone there ever was to look at in this world. “We need to make it to the Met before two. Unless you want me to leave you here?”

Onward it is.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for being patient! I try to focus on quality over quantity, and didn't want to rush this story, so I hope you all will be okay with less regular updates than before. I will still try to update as often as I can, but I want this second part to unveil as organically as possible. Thank you for reading, and for your continuous support :) 
> 
> *Sorry for the lack of updates as of July! I plan to update sometime this month with at least one chapter.

The Met is a prominent character in New York, boasting such rich history and circumstance that many who enter rarely understand even a tiny piece of its contents. My father is not one of these people, having spent years in my youth studying entire rooms for months. I’d watch him for hours, sometimes sitting on the benches, other times standing beside him, looking at pieces like I could see what he saw. Maybe I did, I realize now, as Oliver leads me up the steps and inside. Maybe I know everything there is to know about this place, but then, nothing at all as I welcome it alongside him.

            “I suppose you want to see the Monets,” he comments as we stand there in the main lobby, stuck between packs of tourists who have no idea what they’re looking at. Oliver lets them by, a polite smile at his lips, and I have every urge to touch that smile again, every day, every night, for as long as I have time to give him. I am still though, watching, blushing, staring.

            “ _Regatta at Sainte-Adresse_ ,” I say, breaking off toward a different hallway than he had been about to head down. He creases his brows. “It’s this way.”

            “Why do I even bother?”

He is annoyed, jealous even, and I stop so he can catch up to me in the shadow of an empty walkway.

“Okay.” I lean back against the wall, arms folded over my chest, my heart beating incessantly and I’m sure he can tell. “So, show me. I haven’t any idea where I’m going.”

“Smartass,” he breathes. “Your dad bring you here when you were younger, right? God, I should’ve known.”

I lift a shoulder. “Sometimes.”

“Yeah, _sometimes_ , meaning, every goddamn day.”

“Only every other day.”

He punches me softly in the shoulder and I seize his wrist, fingers feeling for his pulse in the vein. A jolt runs beneath my hand I release him as we move forward, back into the daylight shining in from the windows above. Oliver glances at me as we pass by a Grecian sculpture my father used to call “the most eloquent”. When I see it now, when I briefly stare into its eyes, I know he was right. Maybe Oliver sees this too—the face of someone caught in history, unsure of their future. Life amongst shambles, love amongst war. It all comes through in the face.

We wander in and out of rooms, seeing piece after piece, though feeling very little toward any of them. Perhaps that is just me, saving everything for him.

_Do you want to know the origin of this Renoir? The exact color used in this Degas? What Van Gogh was thinking when he painted this? No, not right now. I want you to only think of me. The green in that wood—my eyes. The soft rose in that sky—my face when you look at me. The deep, dark golden in that field of flowers—the color of our sky before midnight. If you think about any of this art after today, may you think of me thereafter._

The _Regatta at Sainte-Adresse_ is now before us, and my skin pricks with chills at the familiarity of it, the brushstrokes and layers of a Monet. The soft wash of the shoreline, brimming with people in pastels. The sailboats just starting their voyage into the sea. I recall my mother’s description of it, at the back of my mind from several years ago.

“Like a farewell.” She had smiled and nodded. “The people on the shore—maybe they have absolutely nothing to do with those on the sailboats. But maybe they don’t have to. That’s it, no? Goodbyes exist whether they are said aloud or not.”

She had spoken it in French, but it had sounded enchanting either way. My father had kissed her, beaming, and I had agreed without really understanding it.

As we make our way back to the front of the museum, I’m overwhelmed with that sense of goodbye. Had Oliver and I ever exchanged those words? My stomach goes to knots as I realize how trivial it is. No, we hadn’t. But still goodbye had come, more than once. He was one of the sailboats, always drifting away from me. Would it happen again? Am I so entranced to think goodbye had turned to dust at our lips when we had left his house not ten hours ago?

_Stop. Just stop._

But I say it aloud, so stupidly.

“Elio?” he asks, turning around, pausing in front of the gift shop. “Stop what?”

I pinch the bridge of my nose; will everything in the world to stop but him. _Please keep going. Please take me. Please never stop as long as I’m beside you. Please forget all the stupid things I say—that is, forget everything I say. How can you stand to hear me speak in such pandemonium?_

“When you left last summer, and when you left last week… you never said goodbye,” I blurt out, soft but lucid. A cinema sized confession shown exclusively to your own eyes alone. He blinks at me, closes the space between us, and guides me against the wall outside the gift shop. For several seconds he just stares at me, his eyes taking on every shade of blue. I’m lost inside them, captured forever in a current neither of us quite knows the depths of. His abyss, my abyss.

Consideration casts down upon me as he rests his head on the wall, his lips moving with no sound. Like he knows me so well—and he does—that if he doesn’t speak right way, my mind will concoct every answer for him.

“I couldn’t,” he says, breaking eye contact. His eyes find the ground at our feet, a certain shyness returning in his body. “How do you say goodbye to someone like you?”

“Just like everyone else, I suppose.”

“No.” He shakes his head, chuckles. “Christ, I—we should head back to the hotel, right? Are you hungry? Stop along the way?”

I pretend to ignore his dodging on the subject, maybe because I don’t have a real answer, either. I hadn’t said goodbye, either. It had lingered in the thick atmosphere between us, unsaid, for many months. When he came back, it had disappeared within seconds of seeing him.

_I hate what you’ve done to me—but God, how I’ve missed you._

“Stop along the way,” I finally agree, breaking away from the wall and heading for the outside. “What are our options?”

“Pizza, of course. Or will it be too Americanized for you?”

“I’ll manage.”

We find ourselves a few blocks from the hotel, pressed into the corner of a tiny New York style pizza shop, waiting. The place is packed with people, mostly New Yorkers, as I’m fairly positive an average tourist wouldn’t know of the hidden gems like this one as Oliver does. I see myself again—as I am back home, so he is here. In his element, in his own habitat, showing me everywhere I’d ask about and everywhere I don’t, but that he will tell me about anyway. Like clockwork.

While we wait, he shares the history of this building and how long the owners had been around. I nod along to everything, listening forever, but not so much the words—just his voice. How beautiful he sounds when love coats his tongue. How natural he speaks when no one hears it but me. How much he is himself, myself, us.

_If I had never known you, how would I ever have known myself?_

“Perlman,” someone behind the counter calls out. Oliver smiles and weaves his way back to the front of the shop. I meet him at the door, a cardboard box bigger than my torso now between us.

“This feels like a bad movie, huh?”

“How do you mean?”

He gestures outside. “It’s raining.”

With a shrug, I push out the door and onto the sidewalk, where tourists have started to crowd under awnings and in alleyways. The real New Yorkers don’t mind as much, with umbrellas or newspapers, hoods or hats. Oliver tells me to run, laughing, and we cover the blocks back to the hotel in what feels like only seconds, my adrenaline fueled by him behind me. When we get back to the lobby, now full of people fleeing the rain, a concierge stops us on our way to the elevators with a firm hand on my shoulder.

“Hotel guests only, please,” he says.

Oliver is right beside me then, towering over the man with his polite annoyance, a tight-lipped smile and a voice meant for reprimanding children.

“We have a room on the seventeenth floor,” Oliver tells him, flashing our key. “Is there a problem?”

The man eyes me, too closely, and I rub the back of my neck out of habit, my eyes twitching.

_I don’t look like I belong here. I don’t look like I belong here—with him._

“My apologies.”

I feel Oliver clap me on the back, all but ignoring the concierge, and we move around him to the elevator bank. Our hair is dripping all over the floor and I feel like my entire body will become a puddle of overreacting teenage emotions if anyone else looks at me with the same face of the concierge— _you, with him?_

We shuffle into the elevator in silence, him pressing the button for our floor, me staring at the ceiling. I am right beside him, our bodies almost touching, leftover rain pooling beneath us, but I don’t know how I can look at him right now.

_It’s obvious, isn’t it? Maybe we are one person, but to others we could not be more worlds apart? On the outside, to the outsiders, we are like a disease? If they even think that way of us—together? Would anyone ever put us together and smile, know that we are made for each other, and be happy for us? Or shall we always remain a secret in the face of the world at large? Must we hide in plain sight?_

“Hey,” he says, so soft. He sets the pizza box down on the floor as we pass the ninth floor. “People are assholes.”

“Yeah,” I mumble.

When we reach the seventeenth floor, and the doors open to invite us out into the hallway, Oliver cocks his neck with a smirk he must have been saving, for he’s off the elevator with the pizza before I even have time to register it’s stopped. I follow him into the hall, and he turns the opposite way of our room. When he holds out his free hand, my doubt bounds off of in me in waves, rolling off and away from me as he hurries us past door after door, until we reach the end. Nothing but a single bay window is there, gauzy white curtains slightly parted.

“One last stop,” he says, pulling one curtain to the side. Droplets of rain glide down the windowpanes but in the distance I see it, his finger guiding mine toward it through the glass. “The Empire State Building.”

“Eh. Overrated.”

He leans back against the window, his face above mine in shadows. “It was the first place I went when I got back from Italy last summer,” he says. “I got off the plane and I—somehow I found myself there, on the top deck. Looking out over the city, all these people, so lifeless. I realized, right then, that I was one of them. Lifeless, going through the motions, right? But last summer—I never felt like that. Not with you. I knew that, still I had come back to my lifeless existence and asked Jenny to marry me. It was almost like I was testing myself. ‘Be with her, make her happy, at least someone will be. Be with her, make your family happy.’

“Maybe you’ve figured it out by now,” he adds, his palm at my chin. “But it should really be about what makes yourself happy.”

“And that’s me?”

_Stupid, stupid, so stupid. Of fucking course it’s you. Idiot._

“Yes. That’s you.”

The pizza all but forgotten, he blends into me, hands at my neck, hands in my hair, hands on every inch of skin he can find. I feel my body surrender to a jellylike state, clinging to him like a force of life holding me to the earth. And who am I, if not put here for him? Who is he, if not my anchor, and vice versa? How would we continue to exist, if not exclusively like this?

We trail each other back to our room, hands never leaving each other, and I burst into a heave of a laugh when he produces the pizza box and flings it onto the bed. Neither of us moves to open it. Instead, he crosses the room to the sofa and I have every choice to join him, always him, and forever him.

“I’m not hungry,” I say, tracing his hairline with my eyes closed.

“Later.” The corners of his eyes crinkle. “It can wait.”

“It can wait for what?”

But we are laughing, nervous, in sync.

“To quote one Elio Perlman… _Things_.”

Tomorrow we’ll be back in Italy, in our room, in the light of a thousand summers meant for us two and beyond, under the roof of my parents and the creaking sounds of the villa, but tonight we are in New York City, and though we might still be in some likeness of hiding and renewed virtue, I have never felt more open with anyone in my life.


End file.
